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The Ways of Silencing

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

We might wish politicians and pundits from opposing parties to engage in reasoned debate about the truth, but as we know, this is not the reality of our political discourse.

Instead we often encounter bizarre and improbable claims about public figures. Words are misappropriated and meanings twisted. I believe that these tactics are not really about making substantive claims, but rather play the role of silencing. They are, if you will, linguistic strategies for stealing the voices of others. These strategies have always been part of the arsenal of politics. But since they are so widely used today, it is worth examining their underlying mechanisms, to make apparent their special dangers.

The feminist scholar Catharine MacKinnon famously declared, “Pornography silences women.” In the 1990s, the philosophers of language Jennifer Hornsby and Rae Langton developed an account of the mechanisms of silencing that could substantiate MacKinnon’s claim. But their basic ideas extend beyond the examples they chose, and can inform us about silencing in our political discourse today.

Leif Parsons

In her 1993 paper, “Speech Acts and Pornography,” Hornsby used an example, credited to Langton: Suppose that men are led to believe that when women refuse a sexual advance they don’t mean it. Women, then, will not be understood to be refusing, even when they are. If certain kinds of pornography lead men to think that women are not sincere when they utter the word “no,” and women are aware that men think this, those kinds of pornography would rob women of the ability to refuse. Using “no” to refuse a sexual advance is what is known as a speech act — a way of doing something by using words. Hornsby and Langton’s work raises the possibility that a medium may undermine the ability of a person or group — in this case, women — to employ a speech act by representing that person or group as insincere in their use of it.

Silencing extends to politics when outlandish claims are made about public figures. Suppose that President Obama really was a secret Islamist agent, or born in Kenya. In that case, he would be grossly insincere. We would have no reason to believe what he said in any situation. The function of disseminating such claims about the president is not to object to his specific arguments or agenda. It is to undermine the public’s trust in him, so that nothing he says can be taken at face value.

There are multiple purposes to political speech, only one of which is to assert truths. Nevertheless, we expect a core of sincerity from our leaders. We do not expect a Muammar el-Qaddafi. It is belief in this core of sincerity that bizarre claims about the president are intended to undermine.

Silencing in the sense described by Hornsby and Langton robs others of the ability to engage in speech acts, such as assertion. But there is another kind of silencing familiar in the political domain, not discussed by these authors. It is possible to silence people by denying them access to the vocabulary to express their claims.

One of the best investigations of propaganda was presented by Victor Klemperer, in his book “The Language of the Third Reich.” The data for Klemperer’s claims was the language used by the Third Reich. But the points he makes are applicable to propaganda in the service of much more mundane endeavors, be it to pass health care reform or to increase or decrease taxes. The use of propaganda is not limited to a single political affiliation or intent.

As Klemperer writes in “The Language of the Third Reich,” propaganda “changes the value of words and the frequency of their occurrence … it commandeers for the party that which was previously common property and in the process steeps words and groups of words and sentence structures in its poison.” When writing these words, Klemperer was thinking of the incessant use of the term “heroisch” (“heroic”) to justify the military adventures of the National Socialist state. Obviously, the mechanism described by Klemperer is not used for such odious purposes today. Nevertheless, there has been a similar appropriation of the term “freedom” in American political discourse.

Most would agree that heroism and freedom are fundamentally good things. But the terms “heroisch” and “freedom” have been appropriated for purposes that do not have much connection with the virtues of their original meanings. Whatever one thinks of the wisdom of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, it is difficult to have a reasoned debate about its costs and benefits when the invasion itself is called “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” Similarly, whatever one thinks of tax-cuts, or the estate tax, it is difficult to engage in reasoned debate when they have been respectively relabeled “tax relief” and “the death tax.” It is difficult to have a reasoned debate about the costs and benefits of a policy when one side has seized control of the linguistic means to express all the positive claims. It is easy to say “a tax cut is not always good policy,” but considerably more difficult to say “tax relief is not always good policy,” even though “tax relief” is just a phrase invented to mean the same as “tax cut.”

Silencing is by no means limited to its target. The Fox channel engages in silencing when it describes itself as “fair and balanced” to an audience that is perfectly aware that it is neither. The effect is to suggest that there is no such thing as fair and balanced — that there is no possibility of balanced news, only propaganda. The result is the silencing of every news organ, by suggesting a generalized gross insincerity.

The effects of a belief in general gross insincerity are apparent in societies in which the state media delivers only propaganda. Citizens who grow up in a state in which the authorities deliver propaganda have no experience with trust. So even if the members of that society have access to reliable news, say via the Internet, they do not trust it. They are trained to be suspicious of any organ marketing itself as news.

Silencing is only one kind of propaganda. In silencing, one removes the ability of a target person or group to communicate. As a philosopher of language I am less qualified to make a judgment about the wisdom of Plato, Machiavelli, and Leo Strauss than I am to comment about their favored political tool. However, I do think that given our current environment — of oppression, revolution, intervention, war, pseudo-war and ever-present human power relations — it is worthwhile bearing in mind the dangers of the manipulation of language. What may begin as a temporary method to circumvent reasoned discussion and debate for the sake of a prized political goal may very well end up permanently undermining the trust required for its existence.

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The Stone features the writing of contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. The series moderator is Simon Critchley. He teaches philosophy at The New School for Social Research in New York. To contact the editors of The Stone, send an e-mail to opinionator@nytimes.com. Please include “The Stone” in the subject field.